Madam Speaker, yesterday morning, Bill C-28 was introduced in this House. This is a rather bulky document and it is clear from reading these 461 pages that much of it is meaningless.
I would like to come back to the financial administration of this country. Before the 1970s, at the end of every year, the Canadian finance minister would report either a surplus or a small deficit and, as a result, there was no Canadian debt.
Then, 1968 saw the election of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Thanks to his delusions of grandeur and his lack of talent for public administration, we started accumulating one deficit after the other. During the Trudeau years, from 1968 to 1984, not counting of course the nine-month Conservative interlude under Joe Clark, Trudeau and his cabinet, in which, we will recall, the current Prime Minister served as Minister of Finance for several years, managed to build a monstrous $250-billion accumulated debt.
In 1984, we changed our red car for a blue one. The ideas put forward then were those of the Conservatives, who reminded me at the time of calves stampeding out of the barn for the first time in the spring. Stir-crazy. You will no doubt recall that there was one spending scandal a month and, in nine years, the accumulated deficit grew from $250 billion to $500 billion.
In 1993, we traded cars again and went back to a red one. Of course, the deficits continued to rise, to the point where we now collectively owe some $570 billion, with a zero deficit being anticipated this year. We even expect a surplus, and the Liberals are beginning to wheel and deal on how surpluses should be shared out.
Let me remind you that, year in year out, we currently pay $44 billion—and this will please former Social Credit members—in interest alone. The Minister of Finance, who is very astute, says “We will avoid having to pay interest; we will reduce transfers to the provinces by the same amount”. The same minister managed, over a three-year period, to reduce by $42 billion the transfers to the provinces for hospitals, post-secondary education and social assistance, so that it is not uncommon to see a student saddled with a debt of $25,000 to $30,000 by the time he or she gets his or her B.A.. Your child, and mine, has incurred that kind of debt to get his or her B.A.. Again, the current Minister of Finance is largely responsible for this situation.
The minister has some nerve. He is said to be a multimillionaire and he owns Canada Steamship Lines. And he is very very familiar with Canada's financial rules and also the rules of Revenue Canada. Do you know what he does in order to avoid paying taxes, or in order to pay as little as possible, in the country whose fiances he directs? He registers his ships in tax havens, Barbados, Bermuda. That is our Minister of Finance. We are sunk.